Bar Code Technology In Healthcare

Bar Code Technology in Healthcare President Elect-Obama (2009), stated in a speech at George Mason University: To improve the quality of our health care while lowering its cost, we will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that within five years, all of America’s medical records are computerized. This will cut waste, eliminate red tape, and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests. But it just won’t save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs – it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health care system. Many studies have been made and in all, the results have come back, the public is concerned with the way he or she has received medication from a healthcare
In his or her training they are taught that when humans read or record information there is a small but dreadfully real error rate. Many mistakes made by pharmacies are from the misunderstanding of physician’s unreadable handwriting. It has always been accepted that the practice of check, and double check would catch errors, which then, would be corrected before administrating any medications. This practice has been found not to work more and more. ABC Nightly News reported a case of a decimal point being misplaced when writing out an order. This caused a child who was in the hospital to be given a fatal dose of morphine (Fatal Medication Errors, Study: Children Often Getting Wrong Medication in Hospitals
Utilizing bar code scanning for caregivers also accurately captures user information for charting, charging and provides an effective audit trail. When the caregiver scans the patients bar coded wristband, the caregiver has real-time access to the patient’s orders and can view what currently needs to be done for the patient. When the caregiver then scans an item or medication, the scanned bar code is compared with the order profile. If it does not match the caregiver is alerted to the discrepancy, and a potential error is averted (Council., 2003). Disadvantages Although using barcodes is highly affective, there are times when there are disadvantages in their use. Errors that can occur are on the printed barcode labels. They may not be printed correctly or it may contain the wrong data. Not all the medications have barcodes, and some over the counter drugs do not match with pharmaceutical databases. More disadvantages can be the bar-coding equipment is too complicated to use; the caregiver may bypass the process and administer the medication without scanning. Also, barcode equipment must be reliable and be readily available. Many healthcare providers have been stated as saying that bar code based processes eventually will be replaced by RFID processes so we 'll wait for that to take hold (Barlow, R.